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Monday, 26 August 2013

This morning I woke up to find that the internet suddenly turned into Victorian England. At least that is the only explanation I have to make sense of all the controversy over your VMA performance. In fact there seems to be so much upset over you that I kind of feel a little irresponsible for what I'm about to say.

I don't care about your performance.

Maybe it's because I don't have any daughters. Maybe it's because I'm the last living soul who still exists in 2013 where I'm bombarded with twerking videos on a daily basis. I can officially say I've seen cats and dogs twerking and they did a better job than the people twerking in animal costumes on your stage. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to be your teenaged mother and I was watching Madonna masturbate on stage before "Achy-Breaky Heart" was a twinkle in your Daddy's eye.

If you think it's controversial for people to see a little girl they watched grow up on the Disney Channel doing a raunchy bump 'n grind well, Christina Aguilera was doing that long before anyone ever heard of Hannah Montana and, at the time, I found it way more uncomfortable than watching you. But by the time you did it, it was already done (and done better) by Christina and Britney. Aguilera even worked with Furries before you (Holla Furries! @ 3:38):

Honey, not only has this been done before, it is overdone. Watching your performance had all the novelty of eating tired, grey leftovers that had been reheated too many times. Little girls proving to the world that they are all grown up by overtly demonstrating their sexuality is just a trope now. We expect it.

It's a phase like biting or tantrumming or colouring on the walls. The only appropriate response to you right now should be "Oh look! She knows sex now. Isn't she cute?" And then wait for you to get over it. In approximately 2-5 years you will probably be hawking organic Furry onesies for babies on your own Mom-blog alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Jessica Alba.

You know something, Miley? For all my snarkiness here, I kind of like you. I don't know why (I certainly don't like your music), but I do. You are young and rich and beautiful and are no doubt having the time of your life. You are a very mediocre yet very famous popstar. Being raunchy on a stage isn't likely to ruin your life. At worst it will probably embarrass you in the same way old pictures of you falling asleep on the potty will embarrass you. My advice to you girlfriend, is let your freak flag fly. You're only young once so live it up. You want to be raunchy? Go for it. As long as you're having fun.

But let's be honest here: there is a metric fuckton of try in this performance. If you are truly trying to shock anyone other than your grandmother you are going to have to do better. If you really want to shock people you have to do something unexpected. Do something no one ever expects young, beautiful rich people to do. Go to college. Get arrested at a protest. Start a not-for-profit business. Join the circus. Start a cult.

But then it's possible that I've missed the point entirely.

Perhaps the whole point is to have you ironically playing the little girl grown up while ironically bumping and grinding on Robin Thicke, who is simultaneously ironically disrespecting women and generating even more irony because NONE of this SHOULD be controversial, because it's all been done before by people who did it with MORE shock value, thus creating a huge vortex of collective irony on the stage so massive it collapses in on itself and becomes one giant, ironic black hole birthing a whole new ironic universe.

Because if that was your goal then brava, girlfriend! You are a fucking MENSA level genius.

P.S. (Dear Internet: Calm the fuck down. You are the birthplace of Goatse. Get a grip.)

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Why approximately? Because we can never remember the exact date of our anniversary.

Why can't we remember? Because that's just the type of people we are. We revel in the fact that we don't keep track of such things. If I hadn't been pregnant with Frack on our wedding day I don't think we would have any idea how long we've been married for.

We are not "romantic" types. Well we are, but not in a recognizably traditional sense. Poetry makes us laugh. I think flowers are a waste of money. We sometimes like to hate-watch romantic comedies together so we can snark on them. "Our song" is a happy hardcore rendition of "Like a Prayer" because one night at a club he got the DJ to play it as a joke and then dragged me out on the dance floor so we could dance like idiots.

Because when I was a little girl and my friends were designing their dream weddings, all I cared about was the "happily ever after" part. I did not give a fuck how it happened so long as it happened. Whenever I gave any thought to the actual wedding I wanted to elope.

Because when you suffer from anxiety the last thing in the world you want is to be responsible for planning a huge social event where every little detail is super important and you are the center of attention.

In fact when we were first planning our wedding I was having panic attacks just thinking about this stuff. My husband didn't care how we got married but he did want to have some kind of reception party. Every time I gave any thought to the cost of this party, or what food to serve or which people should be invited (and which ones to leave out) I wanted to curl up in the fetal position and bury my head under a pillow until it was all over.

It was upsetting me so much I was on the verge of handing over the entire planning of everything to Mummy Dearest and her sisters. Instead I sat down with my husband and explained how our wedding was ruining my peace of mind and we got to planning my real dream wedding. A wedding that would really make me happy instead of a nervous wreck.

This made all the difference. Once I stopped worrying about the wedding I was supposed to have and started planning the wedding I really wanted it turned out to be a lot of fun.

I went online and searched for a minister who would be willing to come to our home for the ceremony. I narrowed it down to three candidates, all of whom I had spoken with on the phone and all of whom seemed to be absolutely lovely people. I couldn't decide so I let my husband choose. He ended up choosing the lady minister because he liked the idea of us being married by a woman. I thought this was adorable.

She gave us three ceremonies to choose from: religious, spiritual, or civil. We picked the civil ceremony because it was the shortest...and then we cut that in half. What it lacked in religious wording it made up for in flowery poetry on love and marriage. We knew that if we happened to look at each other while she wsa saying that drivel we were likely to burst into derisive snorts of laughter. We gleefully crossed out anything that wasn't "Do you? Do you? Done."

It looked very similar to this.

We simplified the guest list to just immediate family members and wore whatever we happened to have in our closets. Fortunately I had already purchased my dream wedding dress four years earlier. It was a beautiful deep red and cream coloured sari I bought to attend my friend Jen's Hindu wedding.

(What? Jen is a totally popular Indian name. Shut up.)

We bought frozen hors d'ouvres to serve and put Mummy Dearest in charge of the cake.

It was a month before the wedding (it was on Canada Day in fact) when we found out I was pregnant with Frack. How much of a piss off would it have been to put all kinds of work into a wedding reception only to find out you can't even drink at your own party? But with our easy DIY, backyard wedding it wasn't a big deal. We saved the news, deciding that our wedding day was the most efficient perfect time to tell our families.

We were married on a beautiful summer day in front of our house at sunset. The minister, I guess thinking we'd regret our edits, ended up improvising, sneaking in a little romantic poetry after all. We managed to behave ourselves and only exchanged amused smirks at each other. The bakery fucked up the wedding cake and decorated it in hideous orange roses. This greatly upset my mother but, I don't know, I was kind of tickled by the idea of an ugly wedding cake.

There was no dancing, no long speeches or endless toasts. We made one toast in which we announced our pregnancy. My mother cried. We ate our fresh out of the oven, frozen hors d'ouvres and ugly wedding cake and it was one of the happiest days of my life.

Some girls are in their glory when planning their wedding. It's their special day where they get to be Queen, and that's all fine and good for them. But I'm not that girl.

For me a wedding is a lot like having a baby. The more planning you put into the birth, the more likely something will go wrong/differently than you planned and you will be disappointed. It doesn't really matter how the baby is born so long as they get here. What matters is what happens for the rest of their life.

In marriage it doesn't really matter how the wedding goes so long as you get so say your "I do"s. It's just a day. What matters is what happens for the rest of your lives together.